Adding comments, related posts and copyright notice to RSS feed

I’ve seen people mention that a good way to prevent feed scrapers from doing so is by adding a copyright to the feed, but I never really understood why that would help.

But then I met someone who was building up his community site, and he asked if he could publish the feed of one of my sites on his site. I said fine, since I didn’t really see any difference between someone reading my feed there or in their feed reader. However, it made me uncomfortable that he would be getting good material (well, hopefully it’s good) with little to no effort.

So I decided to try to make this work to my advantage as much as possible by extending my feed with additives that I hoped would gain exposure for my site, and even drive feed readers there.

If you use the Simple Tagging plugin, as I do, leave “Insert similar content in feed?” unchecked. If you don’t use Simple Tagging, select this option.

Number of items with similar content – enter how many related items you want to appear. I entered 5.

Identify posts with password – I left this unchecked.

Add abstract of posts – I left this unchecked, since I have a full-text feed, and this didn’t sound like something I want.

Number of words – I think this is not relevant if you don’t select Add abstract of posts in step 14.

Before items with similar content:<hr /><h2>Related Posts:</h2><ul>

Before the titles of items with similar content:<li>

After the titles of items with similar content:</li>

After the items with similar content:</ul>

Simple Tagging Related Post in feed? – select this if you use the Simple Tagging plugin.

Full text feed? I left this unchecked, since I use a plugin that ensures a full text feed, even when I use the <!--more--> tag. But I guess I could theoretically deactivate the plugin and just check this option.

I skipped the rest of the options since I don’t know what they’re for, and clicked on Update Options.

That’s it! Now I have a beautiful feed that works hard for me wherever it may go!

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About WPGarage

This is where Rebecca and Miriam from illuminea (and sometimes others) document things they've learned about WordPress. Even after nine years in the field, we're always learning new things about WordPress. Hope this helps you too.